The theoretical nature of risk premiums in foreign currency futures markets is derived and studied empirically. Estimation problems encountered in using futures data are discussed. Since forward rates and futures prices are demonstrated to be approximately equal, and because risk premiums in...

This paper examines the determination of risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. The statistical model is based on a theoretical model of asset pricing, which leads to severe cross-equation constraints. Statistical tests lead to a rejection of these constraints. We examine the robustness of...

Fama(1984) analyzed the variability and the covariation of risk premiums and expected rates of depreciation. We employ three statistical techniques that do not suffer from a potential bias in Fama's analysis, but we nevertheless confirm his findings. In contrast to his interpretation the results...

We examine the interplay between social norms and the enforcement of laws. Agents choose a behavior (e.g., tax evasion, production of low-quality products, corruption, substance abuse, etc.) and then are randomly matched with another agent. An agent's payoff decreases with the mismatch between...

Can we identify the members of a community who are best- placed to diffuse information simply by asking a random sample of individuals? We show that boundedly-rational individuals can, simply by tracking sources of gossip, identify those who are most central in a network according to "diffusion...

We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous...

There is a wealth of research in psychology demonstrating that agents process information with the aid of categories. In this paper we study this phenomenon in two parts. First, we build a model of how experiences are sorted into categories and how categorization affects decision making. Second,...

We define a general class of network formation models, Statistical Exponential Random Graph Models (SERGMs), that nest standard exponential random graph models (ERGMs) as a special case. We provide the first general results on when these models' (including ERGMs) parameters estimated from the...

In this paper we analyze the problem of whether and/or when to replace a leader (agent) when no monetary rewards are available, and it is the leader's competence rather than effort that is being evaluated. The only decisions that the leader takes over time are whether to undertake risky but...

We introduce and analyze a model in which agents observe sequences of signals about the state of the world, some of which are ambiguous and open to interpretation. Instead of using Bayes' rule on the whole sequence, our decision makers use Bayes' rule in an iterative way: first to interpret each...